Che: Part One

Benicio Del Toro Plays the man behind the T-shirts

People too lazy to read memoirs or biographies rejoice! Benicio Del Toro stars in and Steven Soderbergh directs Che: Part One, the first installment of a two-part biopic on the life of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Based on the guerrilla revolutionary’s book, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War,
and intercut with documentary footage of Havana protests, the film
tackles the wartime triumph and tribulations of the 20th century icon.

Part One’s narrative trajectory extends from the night Guevara
met Fidel Castro in an urban loft in Mexico to his major victory in Las
Villas—the last stop before attacking Batista’s forces in Havana. It
also gives us a glimpse of a U.N. conference some years later, wherein
Guevara argued for the legitimacy of the new Cuban government and
singled out the United States as an imperialist oppressor to the less
fortunate of the Western Hemisphere. Screenplay Writer Peter Buchman’s
choice of bouncing between these three settings keeps the movie
interesting by presenting all the history at once instead of following
a straightforward, linear path.

The 126-minute feature (Part Two lasts 131 minutes, for a grand
total of four hours and 17 minutes combined) feels long and meandering
at points, but never boring. Soderbergh keeps us guessing by
differentiating the film stocks and shooting styles. The forest and
mountain guerrilla scenes abound with wide views of lush landscapes. By
contrast, he depicts the U.N. conference and Mexico meeting scenes in a
raw black-and-white, shooting zoomed in with a hand-held camera to
heighten the tension with extreme close-ups.

Che portrays the man adorning hipsters’ t-shirts as he was: not
a saintly, flawless idealist or a raving psychopathic murderer, but a
complex human being with many sides to him. He preached a message of
education for the masses and love for humanity, but complicated that
rhetoric with his brutal methods of attack. He despised the U.S.
government, not the American people—but doesn’t a nation’s government
reflect its constituency?

Che is a must-see for those seeking an evenhanded account of the doctor-turned-rebel.